We Could All Use A Dose Of This 19-Year-Old Dancer's Ambition

Most dancers find their way to the sport by way of their parents enrolling them in ballet classes as soon as they start wiggling around, i.e. by the age of 2 or 3. Elsa Stallings, however, didn't recognize dance as a passion she wanted to pursue until the relatively late age of 13. But in the time since, the 19-year-old has more than caught up to her contemporaries — and is now in her third year at Pace University's commercial dance program. We got a glimpse of the eight-hour-a-day training sessions that go into perfecting her craft with Under Armour in the video below. As Stallings says, "In dance, you can't just wish your way into getting the steps right; you have to put in the time and energy to understand how your body and mind connect with one another." By the looks of it, we'd say that hard work paid off.